How to plan your trips

Planning a trip can be tedious and difficult, especially if you are new at it. Here's how I do my planning.

1. Firstly, you have to decide on a location (duh).
2. Then you check out the price of travelling there. I would google "Cheapest way to go from X to Y". I would also check out the prices and duration of bus, train and plane rides to the target location. In Europe, train and bus rides across countries are more common than you would imagine.
3. Once you have found a transport that is affordable to you, you should plan out the itinerary before booking your tickets.
4. I use tripadvisor a lot. I would google "things to do in X tripadvisor" to see the 209234 things to see in X. Example. I would also go to here to create a map for X. Then I would click the things to see in X and check out the photos and reviews. If I think that it is a location that I would want to visit, I would plot them on the map. Keep going down the list until you think that you have gone through most of the attractions.
5. To see if the attractions are really recommended, google something like "3 day itinerary in X". You would see many proposed itineraries and most of the things that they mentioned should already be on your map. 
6. Next, you want to find out about day trips. Sometimes a city itself does not have much to do, but it may have beautiful towns surrounding it. I would google "X tripadvisor forum". There, you can check out posts by other tripadvisor users. Scrolling down a few pages of posts and you would get a sense of places to go for day trips. For example, for Bologna (Italy), you can do day trips to Ravenna, Parma, Ferrara, etc. You can also see recommendations for duration, things to see on the forum.
7. I would recommend you to jailbreak your iPhone, if you are using one. I load Citymaps2go Pro on it and it is very useful. It contains offline maps and allow you to search for popular tourist locations. Know that even when overseas, you can use location services to detect your current location. This does not use 3G and is a free service. If you do not want to use an offline map app, you can just get the area map and plot it, old school style.
8. I would also put on a word document what places I wish to visit on day what, load it onto dropbox and save it on my phone for offline viewing. So when I am actually in the area, I just load my word doc, see where I wish to go next, and then search it on Citymaps2go. And then I will walk there. 
9. Note down, on the map, the train/bus/airport station that you would be arriving at/departing from.
10. Search for accommodation! Use couchsurfing, airbnb, hostelbooker, hostelworld to search for an apartment location that is convenient for you when touring the place. Once you found one that is of an affordable price for you, you can book it and your transport ticket. That's all!